Critiquing ‘Nation’ as an Ideological Construct in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Abstract

The ideas of nation, nation-state and nationalism have been debated and contested. Nations emerge and recede, or, in many cases, are made to submerge into hegemonic nationalist ideologies. This study examines the ideas of nation, nation-state and nationalism in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) through the prism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory. While doing so, this article will keep the concept of ideology as the central analytical reference point. Ghosh works through a variety of themes and concerns of the human as well as the natural world in this novel, most of which are deliberately excluded from the discussion in this article. Only a section of the book that may be termed as the ‘textualization’ of the Marichjhapi massacre of 1979 in West Bengal has been critically dealt with. In Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, when refugee settlers begin to build a ‘Dalit nation’ for themselves, an antagonistic nationalist ideology emerges, challenging the hegemony of the discourse of the Indian nation-state. Will this emerging antagonistic ideology succeed against the nationalistic ideology of the Indian nation-state and be finally hegemonic? The study shall thoroughly investigate this postulation.